Anxiety Is Not Depression

By Cliff Wise

Anxiety, Depression, and other mental afflictions are regretfully shunned by a society that favors winners. Losers are discarded or left to their own devices in most cases, like I was. This book is an inside, non-medical, non-scientific look inside the brain and life of a person whose life has been dominated by anxiety with a good measure of depression thrown in. It is a summary of methods that the author has employed to fight an invisible lifelong foe, the way the methods were discovered, and their effect. The objective is to provide the sufferer with the feeling that they are not alone, that there is someone else out there like "me." The first person is used to bring reality to this struggle and to give examplessome humorous in a self-depreciative wayof how things worked out. There is a slow buildup over time of an understanding of the issues that the medicine of the time was not able to provide and mostly does not provide today. At the end, values are assigned in a general sense to more than eighty-five methods (used over about sixty-four years of living) found in this book.

Advice: Do not buy this book and give it to someone else without reading it first to find out in your own opinion if it will be helpful to them. If you do and I find out about it, I will hunt you down and give you a solid thrashing. If you want to tell your friends that you were recently thrashed by a senior citizen, dont take my advice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524686543

Cliff Wise

Cliff Wise has been struggling with anxiety and depression issues for about sixty-four years. He has tried many methods to fight against these ailments without knowing why. Anxiety is very difficult to self-diagnose, especially in a society that frowns on mental issues of any kind. Cliff sat down to write the great American novel in the 1990s and this book appeared instead, unraveling the tangle of events that dominated the directions of his life, of which there were many. The use of his life events to explain the methods that may be useful for others is only used to give a context to the events. Coincidentally, there is a lot about him as an individual in the book, and quite a few opinions. If you are interested in the details, then read the book. Cliff currently resides in Manhattan, New York, and Cape Cod. He has lived in six states, Puerto Rico, Europe, Asia, Africa and sometimes rolled up in a ball in the corner in all of these places.

Book preview

Panic Attacks—A Good Place to Start

I had my first panic attack when I was about six. I had been visiting my grandparents in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, with my parents. It was time to go home. I didn’t want to leave because I was having a good time. North Attleboro was a fun place to be and different from the routines of home in Larchmont, New York. I think I made a problem for my parents about leaving. This prompted an acrimonious debate and eventual high-volume argument about leaving. Our family was dysfunctional, and arguments were not rare. I felt sorry that I could not express my opinion without causing so much trouble. I remember having that thought a lot back then.

I went outside to get away. There was a large, concrete pad behind the house where I used to play, and on the pad was a large push broom with very stiff bristles. I liked the sssssst sound the broom made against the concrete and how the bristles flicked the dirt and pebbles out in front. I even liked the cloud of dust that would form around the broom. It was made of little dust bubbles, beings whose lives were momentary. You could smell the dirt.

I could hear the arguing in the background. I was perfectly set up to bust my panic attack cherry. The broom suddenly slowed down. Ssssssssssssssssssssst. Ssssssssssssssssssst. I lost control of it. My hands were still on the handle, but I could not stop it. It went back and forth as if under its own power. There were hands pushing on both of my temples, squeezing my head, trying to crush it, but I could not turn to see who it was. My breath was suspended, like I had the wind punched out of me, and there was a hollow vacuum in the pit of my stomach. A darkness began to take over, not unlike a solar eclipse. I could only see what was directly in front of me. Everything sounded so far away. I felt cold. Still the broom went ssssssssssssssssssssst, ssssssssssssssssssst. I was trapped.

After a seeming eternity, the light returned, and I could breathe again. I turned to face my attacker and found that I was alone. This is when the real terror set in. I dropped the broom and ran inside toward the warm familiarity of the argument I had sought to escape. I did not have the concept of dying at that age, but it was my first experience of not being me. It was the first bump on a long and winding road.

The second major panic attack came at about age forty-two. I had just returned from a business trip to Spain. Things were not going well with the company I worked for, and I was not getting any support from others in the office. I had just written a memo to the owner of the company, recapping the situation and asking to be reimbursed for my expenses. I had reverted to writing memos to ask for anything personal because I was incapable of asking for something for myself. I could ask for anything for someone else, but not for myself.

After delivering the memo, I went upstairs to my office and had trouble breathing. I thought I was dying. My vision tunneled and darkened. My temples pressed in against my brain. I lunged at the phone to call my fiancée to say good-bye. She was at lunch, but her secretary promised to tell her that I loved her. I didn’t have much time. I called my shrink.

She said, Welcome to the other 80 percent of the population. You’re having a panic attack.

There was a lot of time spent between these two attacks trying to avoid having another one, even to the extent of trying to duplicate the attack with the broom. At that time, I wanted to learn as much about them as possible to make sure I could control them. There was also something fascinating about experiencing something other than day-to-day reality. It’s the dark side, I suppose. I was playing with fire.

I know now that a lot of people have these kinds of attacks on a regular basis. My mother did. She used to have to pull the car over to the side of the road to have them. I didn’t know about this until recently. She took tranquilizers when I was in my teens, so I will refrain from getting into the environment versus genetics argument. I don’t have a feeling about the connection between my disorder and hers. It is probably a bit of both.

Some would say, since I did not have major panic attacks on a regular basis, my anxiety problem is somehow diminished, somehow less than theirs is. I disagree. I feel the severity of the disorder should be determined by how dominant the disorder is in the individual’s life. In my case, it was totally dominant. There is no doubt there are people who have severe anxiety attacks who, because of their physical and mental makeups, are able to lead normal lives. I was able to prevent major attacks by employing defense methods.

One of these was the classic going home and rolling up in a ball in the corner. I actually used to get in a fetal position on my bed and shut down. I did not sleep or spend a lot of time thinking about anything. I tried to get everything slowed down and under control.

The stage was set. I had some sort of genetic makeup that was starting to intrude on reality. I had experienced a full-blown anxiety attack. I needed relief from my environment. I was being pulled in a lot of directions. Without realizing it was happening, I developed my first coping method.

METHOD—Gazing

I got the definition of gazing from one of Carlos Casteneda’s books, but I was doing it on a regular basis as a child. I was surprised that anyone else on the planet was doing it when I read that book. I still do it from time to time but now more for fun than anything. It can also produce eye strain and a headache.

In this technique, you allow your eyes to drift or relax out of focus. You will be looking at something, but your focus will not be on the object. As a result, that object seems to split in two, and the images overlap. On the computer keyboard, the G and H would be superimposed on each other, as would all other adjoining keys. But the G would also appear to be in its original place. The F and G keys would seem to be adjacent or superimposed, depending on where you looked. This has some effect on depth of field, and the area around the F and G seems to lose its attachment to the real world.

This is particularly effective when gazing at something natural that does not have sharply defined edges, like rocks. I would use gazing when looking into the water. I could squat for a long time when I was a child. I spent my summers on Cape Cod and had an unusual freedom from adults for long stretches of time. They were watching but from a distance. We lived near a protected bay, and the water was usually calm and warm. I would squat at the water’s edge and gaze into the miasma of life, the hermit crabs, and minnows at my feet. I would sometimes do this for hours, only becoming aware of the passage of time when the tide would rise around me and rock me off my feet. I did this to get away. I don’t remember having any thoughts. I just watched. I guess I was meditating. I feel sorry for children who are boxed in by their parents, especially at the beach. Every time the child makes a move for the water, he or she is corralled back onto the beach. I never had to learn to swim. I just enter the water and become a part of it.

There is an adult version of gazing. I discovered it during my frequent jaunts into the woods and parks near where I lived. When you are walking in the woods, you are the only thing that is moving except things the wind is moving. If you stop to rest or spend some extra time in a particularly beautiful place and keep quiet, then soon you are the thing that is stopped, and everything else begins to move. There is an incredible amount of life in most places. When a relatively large animal like you comes blasting onto the scene, all the other forms of life pause to see what you are. If you stop moving and talking, these other beings, most of which have a short attention span, begin to go about their usual business. You have become part of the scenery. I find the transformation to have a calming effect. If another hiker or, even worse, a mountain biker comes clattering into view, you can see this process repeat itself.

I drive a lot. If I am on a parkway or freeway and there is little traffic, I can relax my eyes for a second, and it seems like I am stationary and the scenery is moving past me like a movie. This continues after I refocus my eyes. What is probably happening is that the act of relaxing your focus gives a temporary alternate perspective to the reality around you. It relaxes me. I don’t recommend trying this while driving though.

METHOD—Following Ants

As a child, another great escape was ants. They fascinated me. I have probably been bitten and stung by more kinds of ants than anyone in Larchmont, New York. This method involves following an ant until it returns to its nest and then finding another one to follow. Your world somehow transforms into theirs. You can feed them and set up great lines of ants. You watch wars and kidnappings, herding of aphids, great building projects, murder, hunting and gathering, and courting. Sex takes place underground, I presume.

When I was forty and still enjoying this relaxing pastime, I watched an entire war in the lobby of the Eko Holiday Inn in Lagos, Nigeria, a conflict that no one else saw. The war took place below a lamp in the lobby. The cement table that the lamp was on was cracked, and ants had built hives inside. One type of ants was in its flying cycle, something they do to form new colonies. All ants fly at one stage of their lives. These flying ants have been fattened up by special keepers and guided up through the tunnels for their only flight, to find a mate and start a new colony. They looked soft and pampered. Another, smaller, and more aggressive type of ant was attacking and capturing the flying ants before they could take off and dragging them into their nest, no doubt to some horrible death or enslavement. They were darker and had large jaws for piercing and snipping. Ferocious, they would swarm over their larger prey, eventually gaining an advantage of numbers over size. I thought of early man hunting the powerful mastodon.

Shifting your focus to a smaller—yet no less dynamic world than the macro one we live in—is a way of getting out of your environment. I would guess that this is what avid bird-watchers, fishermen, and hunters do, but ants are cheaper, and you don’t have to go very far to find them.

As an aside, I learned in Africa that ants and termites usually fly shortly after a rainstorm. This is when the ground is soft, and they can more easily burrow into the ground to form a new nest. I forgot this once back in the United States and, shortly after a rainstorm, drove over to the national seashore nearby at Sandy Hook at the southern point of New York harbor. The ants were everywhere. We had to leave. I felt sorry for the parents who had driven all the way down from New York to give their kids a day on the beach, only to be pestered and driven off by millions of flying ants.

When I see ants in the yard flying up from the ground, I get them to climb on my finger, and I propel them into the air. I call this ant launching. The neighbors probably think I am some sort of nut, except for the ones who know me and know I am a nut. When you are lonely as a kid, you have to entertain yourself. This was in the pre-computer days.

I was enrolled in preschool. I don’t know if it was kindergarten because I didn’t last very long at the Catholic school where I was first enrolled. I was there long enough to completely reject the socialization process and have some interesting experiences, however. My brother and I have differing views of hell on earth. His is working in a steel mill. Mine is being in a confined space with several ruler-toting nuns. That they have an attitude, and a mission is a given. The mission is to get you ready for marine boot camp at Parris Island.

At the usual age, I wound up going to a real public school kindergarten. I wasn’t very social. I guess I had spent too much time by myself. My brother is four years older than I am and went to Catholic school. Four years was a great gap at that age. In that first school, we had to enter from the back of the school to our little classroom, and I could never get the door open. I was late a few times because of that door. I felt trapped outside, which is different from being trapped inside.

This is the first time that I noticed the shallow breathing reaction that comes with anxiety problems. Shortly after the shallow breathing would come the adrenaline and the extra strength that would get the door to open. I was usually out of breath by the time I got into the class.

We did dumb things in that school. I didn’t understand that we were being socialized. Everything seemed like an imposition. The nuns in their black and white habits were trying to turn me into a robot. We had cookies and milk, and then it was naptime. I could never nap. I don’t think that I ever napped until after I wound up in the army, and then napping became a product of complete and utter boredom. My Irish grandmother told me that nuns sold their hair to give money to the church.

During one nap, I decided to find out. I slid over the floor on my back to where the nun was sleeping in a rigid wooden chair and ever so carefully lifted her habit that was hanging over the back of the chair. I found short hair!

The next thing I knew, she was straddled over my prone body. A small fist appeared beside her ear, which grew at an alarming rate until it punched my lights out. The other time I got punched out was just after we were warned not to touch the nativity scene. The nun left the room, and naturally I picked up the infant Jesus to take a look. One girl in the class was a bully. She was larger than most of the boys and very strong. I guess I was a challenge to her dominance. She approached me in a scolding aggressive posture, slapped my hand, and repeated what the nun had said.

The infant Jesus tumbled through the air in slow motion with my grasping hand hopelessly trying to break the warp barrier, catch it, and retrieve my future. The infant exploded in a perfect star upon impact with the linoleum. This time the nun worked on the soft tissue of my midsection, I guess so she would not leave any marks. The first time you have your breath knocked out, you really think you are going to die.

Public school was a relief after Catholic day school. I had a few friends in grammar school, crushes on cute girls, and great male teachers, and all in all, I thought it was a pleasant time. I fell in love with my first-grade teacher. She had just graduated from college and was a radiant blonde with the most pleasant features and demeanor. Something was special there. If every class had been like hers, school would have been heaven. In subsequent grades, I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, detained for disrupting class or some other boredom-related offense. Our principal was the very description of stern. She is the first woman I ever saw in a formal suit. She was tall, and the suit hung from her square shoulders, straight down to her hem without a wrinkle. She never said anything but had this stare that could melt steel at fifty yards.

We took batteries of tests, and the results showed I was going to be the valedictorian of my senior high class. So I was given differential treatment. The principal and several of the teachers wanted to skip me two grades, but my parents wanted me to have a normal upbringing with my own age group. Little did any of us know that I would not even graduate from high school with my class. I wasn’t last, but I was not even there for graduation.

There was no challenge for me in grammar school so I was bored most of the time and didn’t acquire any good learning habits, at least not for the stuff you needed to get good grades. I always got straight As with the usual comment of daydreams or does not pay attention. Boredom creates conflict, which fueled the development of my anxiety.

My parents spent a lot of time traveling on business and left us home with my grandmother, leading to more conflict. I was the tallest kid until sixth grade, maybe even including the faculty, which was an embarrassment. I adopted the habit of walking bent over to avoid the stares from the other kids. The only time I was completely free from anxiety was when we were doing arts and crafts. It was also the only thing that I enjoyed both in school and at home.

METHOD—Drawing

For me, drawing was an escape. Drawing is, by nature, a solitary endeavor. It is usually quiet, and people respect the fact that you need to concentrate to get it done. The annoying doting parent will suddenly stop bothering the kid when he or she picks up a crayon. I got good at drawing because I wanted to be left alone. I don’t think that many people are born artists. If you do anything for ten thousand hours, you are going to be good at it. Anyone can learn to draw. You can take courses and learn the technique, or you can buy materials and just do it. Art is the most subjective thing going, so you can draw socially acceptable or unacceptable things. Some will like and hate both. The important thing is that people leave you alone when you are doing it. You move into what my brother calls the zone. They can all see that you are in there. The zone is where time stops and the anxiety can’t penetrate.

My wife has noted that I have developed an ability to get in the zone in ways other than drawing. An example would be drumming, and I can do it equally as well in public as at home. She claims she can see a change on someone’s face when he or she goes into the zone. Children seem to have a closer connection to the part of art where you are applying paint or crayons to paper than adults do. I feel that this is because the process of becoming an adult is about the process of learning a lot of definitions and concepts that kids can’t grasp. This is why so-called refrigerator art is so brilliant. It is unencumbered by all of this adult noise about what should be what. I knew a grammar school teacher who had framed her student’s art (with permission from the students and parents) and decorated her apartment with it. It was the greatest private art collection I have ever seen.

When you start to draw, just let it go. If you try to duplicate the outside world without a lot of training, you will be disappointed. One technique I found helpful in dealing with the duplication of reality thing was drawing without looking at what you are drawing. We started with bicycles. You would look at the actual bicycle but not the paper. The results were just astounding. The bicycles had more character than we could ever have drawn by trying to duplicate them.

Drawing, as with most methods, is about the method and not the materials. I find that, if I go out and buy several materials before starting anything (with the exception of woodworking), I am building certain anxiety level into the method. My expectations are elevated, and for me, anxiety and expectations are siblings from hell. Get a pencil and a piece of typing paper, and get on with it. If you don’t like the results, see if you can make two points with a turnaround jump shot into the wastebasket. Pencil drawing is legitimate. It will last hundreds of years.

METHOD—Learn What Frustration Tolerance Means

I am not trying to blame anyone for how I did or did not learn things, the missed opportunities, or any of that important stuff. But I must say the way you first do things is usually the way that someone else has demonstrated how to do them. This doesn’t necessarily have to be in a learning situation but can be the simple "monkey see; monkey do." The people I observed doing things I wanted to do had very high frustration tolerances. They would continue pushing forward until the task was finished, no matter what. I learned this term from Dr. Norman, one of my shrinks and a former professor at Harvard. People with a high frustration tolerance can put up with a lot and do not quit easily. Those with a low frustration tolerance fly off the handle easily when faced with adversity. You know who you are.

Most of the people in my family have what is commonly referred to as short fuses, which is nothing more or less than a low frustration tolerance. The bad part about being short fuse-oriented is that it is easy to learn and becomes a habit. This is not a parent-bashing book, but that is where I got my training. It is a common occurrence in our family to have regular outbursts of frustration, intolerance, or anger. It can happen with one person or more than one, a chain reaction. It usually consists of yelling at the top of one’s lungs and is sometimes accompanied by the destruction of the inanimate object that caused the frustration. The more expensive the item, the less likely it will be destroyed. All of the Danish porcelain somehow survived years of outbursts, which led me to believe that some value system is lurking below the surface.

The yelling got to me. I would react by pulling the covers up over my head. Even if I weren’t in bed, I would do it mentally. I had this set of internal covers that I could pull up at any time. I still have this reaction whenever I hear anyone yelling. Physically speaking, I get this blinding injection of adrenaline and accompanying anxiety.

This happened so often that the reaction began moving over into other parts of my life, outside of my parents and grandparents. Others in a similar situation would get these small injections of adrenaline, but mine always seemed to be a flood. I had no control over it. I became addicted to it. There was a time in my life when I was growing independent of my family but before I was living with any woman when my daily routine was a series of blasts of adrenaline interspersed with periods of coasting, like a car with a big engine but only a first gear.

For example, I would get up in the morning, take a shower, and start getting dressed. All of this was in slow motion. The clock was going at its usual pace, but I wasn’t. And it would get to the point where I would be late. I would then explode at something stupid, like trying to get my tie at the right length. The adrenaline would hit the system, and I would shift into high gear. I would be dressed and ready in a flash. I actually felt better when this happened. When I tried to explain this to the people I wound up living with, especially women, they just didn’t understand what I was talking about. I described it as getting myself going. I didn’t see anything wrong with it and found it hard to believe that it would upset others.

As I began to realize that this behavior was causing others harm, I knew I had to change. First, I had to admit that this was an uncompromisingly stupid and antisocial habit. I then talked to therapists and tried relaxation techniques. I encouraged criticism from those close to me. I never completely cleared this from my behavior patterns until I started my medication. I consider this to be a real addiction. Giving up smoking is a piece of cake in comparison.

My first insight into frustration tolerance came at about age twelve, a big year. I gained a lot of insight in my twelfth year. I intended to build something and tried to saw through a piece of wood with a handsaw. I tightened the wood into a rusty old vise in the garage. The saw was dull and flip-flopped if you didn’t saw in a perfect straight line. My arm quickly tired, and I gave up. Soon thereafter I was in a furniture repair shop, and I saw a kid about my age saw through a similar piece of wood. He just kept sawing until it was done. I was astounded. I went right home, put the wood in the vise, and sawed right through it. What a feeling of accomplishment!

My frustration tolerance got so low at one point that I would explode when my shoes came untied. Hey, let’s make that a method.

METHOD—Think about a Basic Change You Can Make to Eliminate an Anxiety

As a case in point, I never learned how to tie my shoes properly. I guess that this is because my mother never learned how to either. The way I tie them causes them to become untied easily, usually when I was tromping down a crowded sidewalk on 42nd Street in New York City in a snowstorm with shopping bags and a briefcase that was always poised to fall off my shoulder. This used to drive me absolutely bughouse. I try not to wear shoes whenever possible, but I have to wear them most of the time. As a child, I always wore tie shoes because that was bought for me. I remember these hideously klutzy shoes that I had to wear to make my feet grow properly. I think they were called Stride-Right. They really worked well, but it was like wearing a pair of Western saddles on your feet. When I began buying my own shoes, I tried penny loafers because that was in style. What a revelation! Shoes you could actually put on and forget about for a whole day!

Without even a conscious effort, I began switching all of my shoes to loafers, boat shoes, sandals, and clogs. Boat shoes have ties, but they are leather and come untied only about every six months. When I was in the business world, I wore tassel loafers from Brooks Brothers. These are acceptable anywhere. I do wear sneakers to play tennis and work out because I’m too cheap to buy the fancy sneakers with the Velcro closures.

I have these great wooden clogs that I bought in Holland for about ten bucks. They have leather tops but huge wood bottoms that go all around your heel. You can walk in four inches of mud and not even get wet. The Dutch call them klompers because that is what they sound like. Klomp, klomp, klomp. The Dutch don’t invent new words for everything like we do. I never would have bought anything like klompers if all of my shoes were tie shoes, and I would still be spending at least twenty minutes a day tying my shoes.

It is amazing all of the cool stuff you can find if you just change one small thing like eliminating most shoelaces from your personal world. I did it, and what’s more amazing is how doing so gives you a feeling of power, freedom, and control over your life.

Now we are getting into my life in junior high school. I never studied in grammar school or junior high. I used to read the encyclopedia rather than textbooks. World Book could have used me for advertising, had they known. Textbooks were boring and only about the same dumb subject. This was back when a computer the size of a notebook today took up five floors of an office building and had a three-shift staff of eight changing burnt-out tubes to keep it running. You might guess that I had attention deficit disorder, but you would have to factor in the fact that I could also follow an ant across the yard for two hours. I began to get into trouble with grades in junior high when studying